Kite Mainnet Launched, Introducing Agent-Centric Payments Layer

On April 30, Kite — the payment infrastructure built for the AI Agent Economy — officially launched its mainnet. During the bootstrap phase, the Kite Treasury will cover network fees, letting users interact with the network without worrying about gas costs. Alongside the mainnet rollout, Kite also publicly launched its Agent Passport: the authorization and payment control layer for AI agents. Users can sign a session with clear boundaries using a passkey (e.g., single-transaction limits, total budget caps, expiration dates, allowed assets, and payment methods). Agents will autonomously execute tasks within these constraints, and users won’t need to share their bank accounts, credit cards, or private keys. All actions are logged in a unified activity feed for easy auditing. Kite uses a “three-in-one” architecture: - **Bottom settlement layer**: An EVM-compatible L1 that natively supports stablecoin settlements, built for high-frequency, low-value, agent-driven payments. - **Middle core service**: Hosted by the Agent Passport, handling identity, delegation, and risk control. - **Top interface layer**: Lets mainstream AI agents plug directly into the runtime. On the application side, use cases like online shopping are already live, with API payments settled via the x402 protocol. The Kite team has explicitly stated they’re not chasing Total Value Locked (TVL). Instead, they’ll publicly track progress using three metrics: total transaction volume, monthly active Passport users, and total settlement amount. Right now, users can sign up for an account at agentpassport.ai, register an agent, and set up bounded delegation authorization. The first batch of supported agents can automatically handle tasks like online shopping, API payment requests, cross-service multi-step workflows, and more.